But listen,! If this process of deflation has got to
go on, let's get at it and deflate in earnest and with good will. I'll confess, if you will, that I wasn't brought up to drive in a taxi ; I'll confess, if you will, that till three years ago I never owned a single gold mine : I'll admit that it is not so long ago that I used to be afraid of a waiter, and could cat .without a finger bowl ; that I used to do such ridiculous things as turn off an electric bulb when I went out just to save light ; that I only ate three meals a day and thought that pate de foie gras was the name of a French general.
We must all deflate. And the young people most of all. How ridiculous—in the inflated days ; to call for a girl in a hired car to take her to a dance only three or four miles away I Let her walk. How insane to bring her a great bunch of hothouse roses ! Let her twine a wild rose in her hair, the way our grandmother did ; or go out with her to the meadows or the pasture and find an early cowslip. We must have deflated courtship and deflated weddings, with a mournful best man, gloomy little de- flated bridesmaids, and a clergyman with all the gas gone out of him We must get down to it - - After all, it won't last for ever. Things never do. Not for nothing did nature frame this universe in spinning circular orbits. Things come around again. Something is bound to happen. Perhaps someone will get up a war, a really destructive war, the only thing humanity seems to understand ; one big enough to restore prosperity. Not right here, of course. But perhaps we could get Brazil—it's an ambitious country—to invade Mongolia. Then the sharp rise in coffee will start an upward move_ ment in leather and a boom in copper and a gold rush to Patagonia, and there we are—spinning-again and with the gas turned on full.
But, till then, let us take our deflation like men—shrink- ing, contracting, subtracting,' condensing, getting smaller and denser and duller—but at least, men.
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